Words

Poet David Bottoms (Photo courtesy the author) David Bottoms grew up in Canton, Georgia, the only child of David H. Bottoms, a funeral director, and Louise Ashe Bottoms, a registered nurse. Their home had only two books: a King James Bible and a book by preacher Billy Graham. It [...]

Writer Joshua Beckman (Photo courtesy of Wave Books) The poems in Joshua Beckman's new book, The Inside of an Apple (Wave Books, 2013), have all the immediacy of a "V" of geese passing overhead: for a brief moment, everything else falls away. While not technically haiku, Beckman's latest [...]

Janet Kaplan (Photo by Silvia Sanza) (Note: This introduction and interview with poet and publisher Janet Kaplan are by Adrienne Brock) While Janet Kaplan has her roots solidly in the New York area, her work reaches into the dirt of both American continents. Born and raised in the [...]

“Every word written is a victory against death," says French writer Michel Butor (Photo via aucoindelaruedelenfer.com) According to The New York Review of Books, only 3 to 5 percent of books published in the U.S. are translations. Whether this is the result of American isolationism, or commercial [...]

2.3 million people are currently imprisoned in the United States, that's one out of every 100 adults---more per capita than any other country in the world. (Repressive China is a distant second, with one in 1,000 adults incarcerated.) As Ayelet Waldman and Robin Levi explain in the introduction to their [...]

Writer Beth Copeland (Photo courtesy of Beth Copeland) The poems in Beth Copeland's Transcendental Telemarketer evoke a range of emotions and places. They're colorful and playful, but also rich in meaning. Copeland writes about the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki, Hokusai's "great wave," and Japanese typhoons, but also Buddhist scrolls, [...]

Seamus Heaney in 1970. Heaney, Ireland's foremost poet who won the Nobel literature prize in 1995, has died after a half-century exploring the wild beauty and political torment of Ireland. He was 74. Heaney's family and publisher, Faber & Faber, say in a statement that Heaney died Friday in a [...]

Jim Harrison in his Livingston Montana writing cabin (Photo by Kurt Markus via outsideonline.com) What a pleasure to have writer Jim Harrison re-launching Gwarlingo's Sunday Poem series this weekend. Harrison's poetry, fiction, and essays pack a visceral punch. His writing is steeped in the senses, in nature, and [...]

Writer Diane Gilliam is the 2013 winner of the $50,000 Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation (Photo by Bob Weinberg) It's rare for a book of poetry to have the same narrative tension and sense of place as a novel. But it's a [...]

Concrete Sound (Photos courtesy Audra Wolowiec) There is no new Sunday Poem post today because of the holiday weekend, but I do have Sunday Poem news to share.... Back in April, I featured the one-of-a-kind artist and poetry book Concrete Sound---a collaboration between interdisciplinary artist Audra Wolowiec and poet, [...]

Writer Geoffrey Nutter under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis (Photo by Maria Diaz) The epigraph that opens Geoffrey Nutter's new collection, The Rose of January, (Wave Books, 2013), is from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Lettuce, apple, or melon, in season---so long as it is good....When their hour is past [...]

Patricia Smith (Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths) What was your least favorite age? For many of us, 13 stands out as a particularly hellacious year. Today's Sunday Poem "13 Ways of Looking at 13" by writer and performer Patricia Smith takes us back to those early, tormented [...]

For 15 years poet Nancy Simpson was Resident Writer at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina Note: This introduction is a guest post by Kathryn Stripling Byer, a writer who has also been featured as a Gwarlingo Sunday Poet. Kathryn's essay appears in [...]

Poet Gregory Orr reading at the 2012 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival (Photo by Michelle Aldredge) With his new book, River Inside the River: Poems, Gregory Orr set a high bar for himself. His intention: to write three lengthy pieces that combine the intensity of lyric poetry with [...]

Chin’gak Kuksa Hyesim was the first Zen Master dedicated to poetry in Korea. As translator Ian Haight explains in his introduction to Magnolia and Lotus: Selected Poems of Hyesim (White Pine Press, 2012), the tradition of Zen Buddhist poetry begins with his writing. Translating poetry by a revered monk [...]

James Crews’ poetry collection, The Book of What Stays, is full of evocative landscapes and secret lives. There is the old woman in Chernobyl who refuses to leave, ice fishing with Patsy Cline, and the moving poems about artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Poet Diane Lockward of West Caldwell, New Jersey, discusses her work at Chatham High School (Photo by Stephen Briggs) Diane Lockward's latest collection of poetry, Temptation by Water, is a book of dualities. These closely observed poems, which are largely free verse, are both witty and fierce [...]

Writer Kate Kingston lives in Trinidad, Colorado (Photo by Ron Thompson) I knew I was going to like the poet Kate Kingston the minute she shared this story during our first dinner together at Brush Creek Ranch in Wyoming: "When my youngest son was a teenager, he [...]

Mari L'Esperance (Photo by Martin Takigawa) "My hope is that my readers approach a poem – any poem – in order to be transformed in some way," says Sunday Poet Mari L'Esperance. "Not dramatically, but to feel by the end of the poem as though something has [...]

Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva in 1914 “I am happy living simply/ like a clock, or a calendar,” Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in 1919. Tsvetaeva's life was anything but simple, for she had the misfortune of living through some of the most turbulent years in Russian history. She [...]

Writer Michelle Bitting (Photo by Alexis Fancher) Today's Sunday Poet was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Michelle Bitting was a dancer and chef before devoting herself to poetry. Her collection, Good Friday Kiss, was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the 2007 DeNovo Prize [...]

Writer Terrance Hayes (Photo by Becky Thurner Braddock) "Language is just music without the full instrumentation," says Terrance Hayes. Music is a constant touchstone in Hayes's poetry. "I’m chasing a kind of language that can be unburdened by people’s expectations. I think music is the primary model—how [...]

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